I'm pretty sure the shoutbox has character limits, because I've seen several messages get cut off. I don't know what that limit is, and the WagaWiki shoutbox article didn't help, either. But, anyway, that's not really my question.

The thing is, could there be like some marker of the remaining characters you can use? For example, when I send SMS there is a counter which goes down with every letter typed. It's not something of big importance, of course, but it would be something nice to have so we don't have to be paranoid about our messages being cut (wait, I should speak for myself: I always get paranoid.) ;-)

in the PHP code, the message is limited to 255 bytes. (note: each SJIS character takes 2 bytes.)
but in the database, the message field is only 200 bytes.

plus, since it puts a break in every 25 bytes... (but hacked to remove the break when it happens to fall in the middle of a 2 byte SJIS character since browsers seem happy to wrap 2 byte characters without need for whitespace...)

so you should be able to fit 100 2 byte kanji characters in a single shout.
200 single byte characters as long as there is no run of 25 consecutive characters without a space.
subtract 4 bytes for each 25+ character without space run for the inserted '<br>'.

feel free to write some javascript to keep track of the characters in the textbox and put up a counter.

- Harumi Nessa - 熱砂 春美(Just kidding '')
'Do you know what it feels like, loving someone who's in a rush to throw you away?
Do you know what it feels like, to be the last one to know the lock on the door has changed?' - Enrique Iglesias <3